Request to drop ethics complaint vs. Hardeeville rejected

COLUMBIA — A State Ethics Commission hearing targeting the Hardeeville elections chief will go forward as planned next month, despite an attempt to get the man who brought the case to drop his complaint.

Scott Ready, elected to Hardeeville City Council in May, said he was approached by an individual within the last month who asked him to back off.

“I’m not at liberty to say who,” said Ready in an interview Thursday. “I didn’t get into their motivation or the reason they were asking. I basically shared with them that it was out of my hands,” said the first-term city councilman.

“They were actually in agreement with me and said, ‘OK, well that’s good,’ and that’s it,” he added.

“There was no animosity or anything about it. They just asked me if I’d be willing to drop it.” Ready also said he was not offered any money to call off the ethics hearing.

He declined to name the individual because of the Sept. 19 ethics hearing. But he said it was not Joyce Meeks.

Meeks, chair of the Hardeeville Municipal Election Commission, is at the center of the upcoming conflict-of-interest hearing with the State Ethics Commission. She is alleged to have abused her official position by favoring her son-in-law, an incumbent who was seeking re-election to the Hardeeville City Council.

In March, Meeks’ commission disqualified Ready because of an error he made on his candidacy paperwork. He was quickly allowed back on the ballot, however, by the 14th Judicial Circuit Court of Appeals.

If his disqualification by the local election commission had been allowed to stand, sitting councilman Roy Powell, Meeks’ son-in-law, would have been re-elected by default, since there were no other challengers.

Ready filed a conflict-of-interest complaint with the State Ethics Commission soon afterward.

In the meantime, Comedy Central’s Indecision politics blog has enjoyed the small-town controversy.

“Aren’t all mothers-in-law the same, what with their constant nagging for pictures of their grandchildren, or grandchildren to have pictures of, and potential election violations?” reads a post in March.

If the 3,000-person city’s unexpected fame — or the controversy that spawned it — stirred any reactions between the three members of the Hardeeville Municipal Election Commission, any paper trail isn’t available.

Though appointed by City Council, the local election commission appears to be left on its own.

A Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the city by Bluffton Today on May 21 for all MEC correspondence relating to Ready — either sent or received on city email or private email — yielded a few pieces of official business from the city administration.

“The MEC has been notified to submit any additional correspondence,” said Hardeeville city clerk Lori Pomarico, when a reporter asked about how the records request would be fulfilled.

“I have asked that anything be submitted to me,” she wrote on May 25.

When a reporter emailed her more specific questions last week about how the MEC members would comply with the request — whether an outside, objective party would scan through the election commissioners’ email accounts for the requested documents, or whether the individual officials would be trusted to turn over pertinent emails themselves, Pomarico did not respond. On Friday, an attempt to reach her by telephone was unsuccessful.

Earlier in the week, the city clerk said local election commissioner Mae Montgomery was the only one of the three election officials to respond to her communication about Bluffton Today’s FOIA request. It was a hand-written note that said she had nothing to turn over. Pomarico said there had been no response from the other two members — Meeks and Lyndia Daniels.

The pending ethics question doesn’t trump the state’s open records law. The ongoing process should not stall any FOIA request for related documents, said Cathy Hazelwood, general counsel for the State Ethics Commission.

In May, the state Ethics Commission found probable cause to schedule a hearing of Ready’s complaint. The stakes next month are relatively high: A fine of $2,000 may be imposed for each violation, along with a public reprimand and an administrative fine for the expense of conducting the investigation.

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